Tempest Rising (22 page)

T
he storm hit. After midnight it started with pretty, twirling snowflakes that could have been pink-draped ballerinas, their fall to the earth was so full of grace. Until the wind lumbered in, a continuous blast of wind that was like a clumsy giant. Tripping all over itself, knocking everything in its path hard to the ground: tree branches, power lines, roof shingles, even the warmth in the air. And what it didn’t knock down, it bumped into and pushed and sent flying, like trash cans, milk bottles, porch chairs, and now three big-legged, brown-skinned, richly bundled girls clinging to a light pole and to each other so that they wouldn’t be blown away from where they stood, waiting, watching, praying for a bus that would take them to their aunts and uncles.

“There’s no bus coming, Shern.” Bliss yelled to
be heard over the loud-talking giant of a wind. “We have to go back. Tell her, Tore. We have to go back to Mae’s or we’ll die out here.”

“We do, Shern.” Victoria tried to yell too, but her voice cracked so she pressed her head into the back of Shern’s neck, forced her voice through the double-knitted scarf so it would get to her ears. “We’re going to get frostbitten out here. Come on, Shern, we tried, okay, but it’s not going to work this time.”

Shern knew they were right. She had hoped that the bus was just late. Had reasoned that buses were often late. Weren’t Mae and Ramona and even Tyrone always complaining about the so and so bus that didn’t get to the bus stop until such and such a time? But this bus wasn’t late. She peered down the street one more time just to make sure, no flickering bus lights, no car lights, for that matter. The only light came from the snowflakes, which were no longer ballerinas but spiked-heeled witches taunting them each time they landed against their flesh, just the snow and the girls and the vacuous stretch of frigid night air filled with the sounds of the lumbering giant wind.

Shern loosed her arms from the pole, called around her to tell Victoria to keep herself wrapped tightly against her back, told her to tell Bliss to do the same. They left the bus stop then, looking like three girls playing choo-choo train the way Victoria was linked to Shern’s back and Bliss was linked to Victoria’s. They all had their heads down, even
Shern, who was trying to be their guide. But Shern could look up only in short glimpses, the witches’ heels were so assaultive against her face driven by the giant wind.

And when she did look up, the entire neighborhood had taken on such a snow-draped sameness that it seemed they were struggling against the wind up the same block over and over again. She lost count. Had they turned at the second corner or the third? Should she now go right or left? If she turned up this street, at least the wind would be at her back, and then she could turn right at the next corner. She was confused. She kept moving, though. She had to keep moving, even as she could feel Victoria behind her, dragging her leg; what she must be going through with that hurt leg. Now she could hear Bliss crying, sobbing. “We’re gonna die, oh, sweet Jesus, we’re gonna die.” She wanted to tell Bliss to stop hollering like that, to save her breath, to keep her head buried in Victoria’s back so her tears wouldn’t freeze to her face. But she couldn’t yell out. She was too tired. Too lost. Too defeated. They would have to stop. They would just have to walk up on somebodys porch and ring the bell, bang on the door, break through the window, if need be. She raised her head a little to look for a house. There were no houses. Nothing but trees. The trees looked so warm and beautiful under their white, satiny blankets, and for a second she wanted to curl up under the blanket too. But then the wind giant’s thumb went right to her chin, tilted her chin
back so that she had to look all the way up, moved the rest of its massive body through the snow witches’ spiked heels, cleared the air so she could focus.

Now she did cry out. Wasn’t that the beginning of the park across the street? And wasn’t this building adjacent to where they stood right now the abandoned bread factory? And now the corner where they stood, wasn’t this the foot of the block where Victoria had fallen? Shern couldn’t believe it. She had walked them in the wrong direction all right. She had walked them back to Dead Block.

She felt like she was falling again, the same way she’d felt the day before as she’d sat on the holy woman’s steps. This time the sinking was in her chest, pulling her down, persuading her to give up, to lay her sisters in the snow and then cover them with her own body so she could die first. She was too depleted to fight the sinking, should have just given up that morning when she’d found her mother with her wrists separating from her hands. Then she wouldn’t have had to endure the social workers, Mae’s, that shed; she could be curled up with her mother right now, both labeled mentally ill. Her knees started to bend, her back curved, her chin pressed against the knot in her double-knitted scarf. She could feel Victoria’s weight, so heavy against her back now, Victoria’s arms hugging her waist, trying to hoist her up, trying not to let her sink. But she knew Victoria’s leg must be ready to give out. Poor Victoria, she rarely complained; that had al
ways been her strength—and her weakness. She should rest now; they all should rest. She could even feel her faith leaving her body in rapid exhalations of the frigid air. Her knees were bent completely; she barely felt them touch the snow through her double-layered leotards and wide-wale corduroy pants. She just wanted to lie on her side, to curl up under the fluffy white blanket, and finally to go to sleep.

But the wind kept her from sleep, stroked her face over and over with snow-laden breaths. She lifted her gloved hands to her face, to shield her face from the persistent wind-driven snowflakes. Then she felt Bliss’s voice against her face; her voice was hot and round with hysteria. “Shern, get up. What are you doing? My God, my God. Get up! Let’s pull her up, Tore; she’ll freeze to death just kneeling in the snow like that. Come on, Shern, get up! Get up! Get up!”

Candlelight flickered deep inside the bread factory as if the tiny flame itself could hear Bliss’s cries. Mister held his flame to the window and got excited when he saw it was those three little gals from last Saturday. He’d known since the day that middle one fell that those gals would be back. It wasn’t just the library books that they’d left on the sidewalk right by his front door, the books he’d dusted every day and kept out of the sun so that the pages wouldn’t yellow; it was their eyes, like the eyes on the Korean girls who had seen their villages bombed. That’s why he hadn’t pushed when they refused his offers
of help. One thing he’d learned in his hours of sweet solitude down here was that there was rarely a need to push; it was the gentle wave that inched farthest inland. So as excited as he was to see the three girls outside his bedroom window, which had once been the lower vestibule to the bread factory, he contained himself. He pulled his pants over his long johns and threw on his orange and gray plaid flannel shirt. He grabbed his coat from the hall closet, actually the pantry where the day-old bread had been kept for resale when his home was still a bread factory. He went around to his terrace, to the side door that would open right where they were standing.

That’s when Shern felt his voice against her face. Thought at first she was already dead and this was the voice of Jesus it felt so warm and soft against her face. “Come on, child. Let’s get you in where it’s warm. Tempest rising out here. Yeah. Let’s go in. Come on, child. Let’s go in. Yeah.”

A
t first Ramona thought that it was the spanking sound of the metal trash can rolling around in the yard that jolted her awake, but then she realized all at once that it was the stillness from the girls’ room seeping through the walls and covering her like a shroud. She sat straight up in her bed, almost gasping for breath. The bedroom air was gray and pink from the outside clouds billowing through her window and mixing with her pink-bulbed night-lamp. It had snowed. She could see the snow-laden branches on the backyard tree that was the center of her bedroom window. Maybe that’s why the quiet was so unsettling and going right to her chest; the storm had hit after all.

No, that wasn’t it. It did have to do with those girls. She had become accustomed to emerging from her morning dreams to their sounds, whether it was
muffled cries, or Bliss and Shern arguing, or the three whispering, or even just their rustling around on the bed and causing the springs to creak. But this morning there were no sounds sifting through the wall, just a rigor mortis–type stillness, as if even the air in the room were locked into place.

She jumped out of her bed, pounded her feet to the floor, fists balled, face fixed like someone ready to do battle. She punched her arms through the air down the short stretch of hallway to get next door to those girls’ room. She just stood there after she threw open the door, and then she was assaulted by the emptiness in the room, as if the emptiness were an oversized hand that slapped her repeatedly in the face. She turned her head to and fro, trying to shake off the emptiness, cursing it, and yelling for the girls as she did.

She ran through the house, then, snatching open doors and then banging them shut. She called out their names as she ran. “Bliss, Shern, Victoria, don’t pull this shit on me.” She was sweating and shaking and gasping. “Where the hell are you?” she shouted. She went out on the front porch; the only footsteps interrupting the fresh coat of snow were her own. She looked up and down the block in its gray and white stillness, moved like a flooding stream back through the house, then down into the basement, even looked under the furniture down there. She burst through the door to Addison’s bedroom in the shed, yanked the blanket from him just to make sure. Finally she went into Mae’s room. She stilled
her shaking by the time she stood at the foot of Mae’s bed, Mae’s ward leader, Bernie, nestled under the sheet against Mae, snoring with his mouth open. The gray outside air rushing through the venetian blinds made the scene on the bed appear like a black-and-white movie on a cheap TV.

Mae sat up all at once. “Who’s that?” she asked squinting through the gray air. “Ramona, is that you? What’s wrong with you busting through my door without announcing yourself? I ought to knock the living shit out of you.” She pulled the bed sheet over to cover herself and, in so doing, left Bernie exposed.

“They’re gone,” Ramona said. She looked away from Mae, preferring to look at the naked mass of the ward leader than watch Mae try to cover her breast, then her thigh, then her breast again. “The girls, they’re gone, they’re gone, gone.”

“What you mean, gone? What the fuck you let happen to those girls?”

Bernie snorted and shook himself awake and let out a small scream seeing himself exposed like that. He grabbed the edge of the sheet wrapped around Mae, and they played tug-of-war with the sheet, leaving them both half naked.

Ramona turned her back on them and talked to the wall. She threw her voice against the wall as if her voice were a sledgehammer and she needed to crack through the wall. “Gone, gone, they’re gone,” she said. “I looked everywhere. They’re gone.”

There was a small knock on Mae’s door, and Ad
dison edged the door open and stepped lightly into Mae’s bedroom, asking, “Everything okay, aunts?” He looked at Ramona quizzically, facing the wall. “You on punishment, cuz? Looks like all you need is a dunce’s hat.” He laughed and then looked at the bed, at Mae and her ward leader fighting over the larger piece of sheet. “Awl, damn,” he said, covering his eyes and backing out of the bedroom. “Shit.”

Bernie huffed and puffed and threw up his hands and didn’t even try to cover himself anymore. He jumped off the bed and grabbed his pants from the chair and did cover his front with the pants. He bounded out of the room and slammed the bathroom door shut. Mae propped herself up in the bed to sitting and leaned her back against her headboard, fully covered with the sheet now, looking as if she were waiting to be served breakfast in bed. “Ramona,” she said calmly, “I think you got some explaining to do.”

“Me?” Ramona’s voice screeched, and she turned back to face Mae, to glare at her, to tell her once and for all that she was a sad excuse for a foster mother and an even more pathetic natural one. But Mae’s expression was so steady, like the face she put on at the card table when it was time to raise or fold, her drooping eye blinking out of sync with her good one, that Ramona swallowed the rest of her words, and only air was left in her mouth, which she huffed at Mae, and then stomped out of Mae’s bedroom. She ran back to the girls’ bedroom to survey it
again, maybe get some clues. Wasn’t kidnapping a possibility? Weren’t their parents rich? Maybe she should hunt for a ransom note. She let the thought go as quickly as it had come. Kidnapping wasn’t a possibility. She was sure. Nor did she need to go in that room to find out why they’d left. The whys were running all through that house. Starting with Addison, she thought, and his dick that was where his brain should be, and Mae with her sweet-sounding words that were like cotton candy, no insides to her words at all, just puffs of sugar-coated air. Even herself. She didn’t want to begin to see her own behavior, hear her own words, which had been filled with venom for the girls. Even after she had allowed Victoria to get close to that part of her she’d kept buried and covered with granite, she would still use her words to slap around Bliss and Shern every chance she got. Especially Shern.

The closed bedroom door stopped her thoughts about Shern. Now she was flooded with the image of the girls curled up in that twin bed. Now she hoped that maybe she just thought the beds were empty, that she’d woke in a fog and gone in there before her eyes were working right. “Please let them be here,” she whispered against logic, praying now that she wouldn’t have to pick up the phone to call the police to report them missing. She opened the door lightly. She would have to call the police. The bed was empty. They were gone.

She went back into the girls’ room to wait for the police to come. The massive gray cloud had gotten
comfortable with this day and was all leaned back in the sky and only allowing a thread of the early-morning pink to push through the window. The pink settled in the bedroom and illuminated what the girls had left behind. The beds appeared freshly made, and Ramona almost choked on the thought that those girls were the type who took the time to make up the bed they’d slept in even as they were preparing to run away. Their trunk was still there; their book bags were piled neatly in the corner; they’d even left shoes behind, lined up in size order and peeking from under the spread. She got down on her knees and searched under the beds for their fur-lined boots. Good, there was a hole under the bed where the boots usually stood; at least their feet may have stayed dry and warm through the night.

Shern’s lime green velvet bathrobe was folded at the foot of the bed, and Ramona picked it up and felt around in the pockets, for what she didn’t know. The pockets were empty, and she held the robe up to straighten it out and fold it down again. She was struck then by the feel of the robe, the way the soft lush threads were warm under her fingers as they yielded to her press and then surrounded her fingers and held them there. She’d never owned anything where the richness permeated every fiber. Even the way the robe smelled, a light sweetness to it, like lavender with a touch of mint, not like the heavy perfume she wore that she bought on special that sometimes reminded her of how a funeral parlor smelled.

She imagined Shern and her mother shopping for the robe together. Maybe they’d just had lunch in the Crystal Room at John Wanamaker’s and then taken the escalator down to the fourth floor, where the sales manager of the fine lingerie department waited on them personally, offered them tea and cookies, and then they sat in the dainty parlor chairs and sipped tea from real china as they waited for the robe to be boxed and wrapped. Ramona was sure that they filled the time with warm chatter, Shern’s mother telling Shern things a girl becoming a woman should know.

Ramona put the robe on and tied the belt around her waist. She lifted the shawl collar up around her chin and breathed in the gentle puffs of lavender and mint rising from the robe like a morning fog. She looked at herself in the mirror in that soft, rich robe. People were always telling her how pretty she was, and some days, right after she’d gotten her hair done and had on a good blouse and her thin gold-tone hoop earrings, she could see that she was pretty. But she’d never felt it. Couldn’t even dream up what pretty would feel like. Except standing in this tight bedroom looking at herself in the mirror in this sweet-smelling robe, the collar pulled up Loretta Young style, she began to sense how pretty must feel, how pretty Shern must have felt every time she put on that robe.

She tilted her chin and gently pushed her hands into the slit pockets and swayed back and forth in the robe. She could almost hear what Shern must
have heard from her mother, hard and soft words about how to live. Courage and dignity wrapped up in her words like spiced apples tucked inside a strip of dough. She imagined that as Shern sat there holding the china cup, she must have felt a rising in her chest that went way beyond just feelings of physical beauty. A line of strength and determination rising up in her like a flag being raised the likes of which had allowed Shern to pack up her sisters and break away from Mae’s.

Damn, she thought, Shern had gotten out, accomplished in a single month what Ramona hadn’t accomplished in a decade. Now Ramona was sorry she’d called the police. She wanted to shout instead, “You go on, Shern. You take God with you, girl, and you just go on. You got out, Shern. You got out.”

She wrapped herself tighter in the robe, tried to nestle her head under the collar, took in the air under the robe that was green like the robe, and soft and sweet. She could feel that stirring in her chest again, a stem of something green like a sapling trying to grow around a rock to get some sun. This time the sapling was stronger than usual, more persistent, but there was the granite, the rock, with mean, jagged edges. The rock was taking over her chest again like it always did when she tried to think about it. She gasped, felt like she was choking. She would just have to choke; she had to let herself remember, swathed in the green of the robe as she was. And then it came. She didn’t even have to force the remembrance. The granite exploded
into tiny bits of sand; then the remembrance just poured out in front of her and moved along on the gray, cloudy air.

E
ven the air in the park was green that day. Blades of grass and tree leaves and shrubbery and stems trumpeted their deepest shades of green because these were the last days of summer and the air swept it all up and dripped color on Ramona and she got a smile in her stomach as she and Mae got closer to the park.

Ramona was five and on her way home from her first day of afternoon kindergarten. She held tightly to Mae’s hand as they jaywalked to get across the street to the park. “My teacher says only cross on the green,” Ramona blurted as Mae half dragged her across the street before the cars rushed down. “She said a car could hit you and then you would be dead.”

“Tell your teacher to kiss my ass,” Mae said absentmindedly, and then laughed. “No, don’t tell her I said that, lil darling. She’s right, we should be crossing on the green, we should be crossing at the corner too. But I got things on my mind. Now you asked me to bring you to the park, okay. We’re at the park. Good and empty this time of day, too. Glad I picked you up early so we got this spot in the park all to ourselves. I’m gonna sit right here on this bench and do some heavy thinking while you go play. And stay in my eyesight while you do, you
hear me. And please, please don’t scuff up your new school shoes.”

Ramona jumped up and down and pulled her hand from Mae’s. “Okay, Mommie,” she called behind her as she ran down a slope of grass straight to the swing. She hoisted herself up on the wooden seat and grabbed the chain links in her tiny hands. She mashed her feet against the earth for her takeoff into what always felt like heaven to her, flying through the green park air, the air whistling in her ears, the aroma of bread baking in the factory across the street going right to her head, making her head feel lighter, the sight of the tree leaves from up high, the sun dancing under her chin as she threw her head back and laughed out loud. She kicked her legs out, then in, then out, until she got the shrill in her stomach that told her she was going high enough, so she eased back on the motion of her legs to maintain the speed that was laughable and fun.

But this day she felt a push against her back just as she tried to slow down the swing. It was a heavy push against her small back, and it sent her up and through the air at the height that was scary. “Stop!” she screamed as she hunched her back to make the shrill in her stomach go away. She looked down and saw the baseball bat on the grass, knew it was that Donald Booker who was always bullying people, especially black people, with that bat. Had everyone at Sayre Junior High, where he sometimes showed up for class, terrorized with that bat.

“Stop it, Donald Booker, right now,” she yelled. “I don’t want to go that high.”

But Donald Booker didn’t stop. He pulled the swing back as far as he could and then with all of his force catapulted Ramona on the swing through the air. Ramona got a feeling in her stomach like she’d never had, like a scream filled with circles of white light. She almost felt it right now, standing in the bedroom wrapped in Shern’s soft green robe. She had to sit down on the bed, had to lean forward so the feeling would stop, so she could finish remembering.